The mystery of Easter Island : the story of an expedition

CAMP LIFE 137

but with these exceptions, it is one of those rare localities where
it is possible to be warm the whole year round, and yet to utilise
to the fall the hours of daylight. There are, as mightibe>xpected,
too many insects; cockroaches abound, out of doors and under
statues as well as in houses and tents; when things were~very bad
they might even be seen on the dinner-table. I was calmly
told, with masculine insensibility, that " if I had not natur-
ally a taste for such things, the sooner that I acquired it
the better"; the only consolation was that they were of a
handsome red variety arid not shiny black. Flies also are
numerous; I have counted two hundred in a bowl of soapy
water, and six or eight at once on my hand while busy
writing; "their tameness was shocking to me." Mosquitoes,
which have been imported, varied in their attentions; when they
were at their worst it was necessary to wear head-gear and dine
in gloves. There is said to be no fever in the islands ; we had
two or three attacks, but it may have been " original sin."
Once we had a plague of little white moths, and occasionally, for
a short while, visitations of a small flying beetle, whose instinct
seemed to be to crawl into everything, making it safer to stuff
one's ears with cotton-wool. On these occasions dinner had to
be put earlier, owing to Bailey's pathetic complaint that, with
a lamp burning in the kitchen, business was rendered impossible
from the crowds which committed suicide in the soup.

The lack of firewood was met by using oil; when, later, we
had to economise in that commodity, it was supplemented by
collecting dried manure. The natives use brushwood or anything
they can pick up; their manner of cooking, which is after
Polynesian fashion by heating stones placed in the earth, requires
very little fuel. The water difficulty was ever present. At the
Mataveri establishment the supply collected from the roof was
generally sufficient; we arrived, however, in a dry spell, and
one morning the request for water was met by the information
that the " tank was empty "; even Mana, one felt, had never-
fallen quite so low. It was consoling to be informed that" clothes
could always be washed in the crater/' a climb of 1,300 feet.
At our Raraku camp all the water, except that wMch could be
collected on the roof of a tin hut, had to be fetched from the
crater lake; this rendered us tiresomdy dependent on getting
native labour. The rain-clouds are often intercepted by the high